Seated on a 5-gallon bucket in a shack near Maine's Penobscot Bay, Ted Ames is chatting with a friend about better days - when commercial cod and haddock fishermen like the two of them could still pull big catches out of the local waters. The scene might look like nothing more than two salty seamen idly trading fishing secrets in their thick New England accents. But Ames has his tape recorder running. He's taking notes for a massive scientific study to see whether the steel-trap memories of local fishermen can help restock the woefully depleted Gulf of Maine. "They can't remember their wives' names," Ames says, "but they can tell you where they got that big run years ago."
A longtime fisherman with a master's degree in biochemistry, the 66-year-old Ames thought scientists would have a better chance of restoring depleted-éfisheries if they knew where, historically, the fish had thrived. So Ames began collecting fish stories from retired netters who knew the gulf when it was teeming with cod. "I started by just talking to my dad's old fishing buddies about what they were catching," he says. "Some of these guys gave me bearings, some identified the fishing grounds by name, some of them even marked up charts."
After collecting about three dozen interviews, Ames used Geographic Information Systems software to plot the catches. With thousands of data points, he was able to trace the cod's migratory patterns and spawning grounds as far back as the 1920s. Ames then took his historical database and combined it with digitized navigational charts to render a one-of-a-kind map of 1,000 square miles in the gulf over time. The project gave scientists a much improved understanding of how various fish species move and interact with one another. In 2004, Ames published his research in the journal Fisheries, pointing out the prime spots for growing cod and stressing that big fish need smaller fish, like herring and alewives, to survive.
Understanding the past in order to engineer the future? An ambitious goal, to be sure, but one that caught the eye of the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded Ames one of its $500,000 genius grants last summer. The money comes with a mandate to keep up the good work. "Fishermen have been telling scientists what they think for years," says Jim Wilson, a marine policy expert and resource economist at the University of Maine. "Ted took those insights and pushed the science forward."
Ames concedes that his shoreside research efforts - he's helping open a lobster hatchery this spring - could keep him out of the water for a bit. And that's just fine. His back isn't what it used to be, making this the perfect time for his research career to take off. With any luck, he'll be better at putting fish into the sea than he was at pulling them out.
- Geoffrey Gagnon
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A Fish Tale
